New NYC Real-Estate Game: Put $100+ Million Price Tags On Apartments That Aren't For Sale

rumours have been circulating around New York that there are a few $100 million apartments available. Unfortunately, it’s not exactly true. The buyers don’t really want to sell their apartments, but brokers do, so they’re talking up these $100 million condos in hopes that they’ll get offers the owners can’t refuse:

New York Observer: On the last Sunday in May, The New York Times ran the first of two real estate stories on an 18th-floor duplex in the new limestone condo, which a physician turned biotechnology venture capitalist named Lindsay Rosenwald bought this April for $30 million. The piece, naming Dr. Rosenwald himself as the source, reported he had received “five or six calls from brokers, offering as much as $100 million.” According to the investor, he turned down the offers. But he also gave this quotation: “The only thing in my life that is not for sale is my wife and my kids.”

Within a week, the apartment had quietly gone on the market, via a memo to brokers asking $90 million. That’s exactly 12 times what Dr. Rosenwald actually put down for the apartment: According to city records, he took out a $22.5 million mortgage for his $30 million purchase, probably one of the most expensive residential mortgages ever filed in New York City…

Days later… the exceedingly powerful broker Dolly Lenz told a crowd (which included an Observer reporter) that not two but three apartments in the [same] building were “asking somewhere between $80 and $125 million,” and another was “quietly on the market at $150 million.”

Lenz will no doubt soon be calling some Russian billionaires. But buyer beware! The uppermost penthouse (aka, the best) at the building in question, 15 CPW, just sold for $21.5 million.